ABSTRACT
Changes in the early twentieth-century brewing industry enraged tenants, who witnessed the decline of long-standing, reassuring paternalism when the brewer “knew his tenants and looked after them” and its replacement with a “soulless” corporate machine. Retailers’ freedom of action was sharply curbed when quarterly tenancy agreements replaced the “London system” in Edwardian England, transferring power from retailers to brewers. From the mid-1920s, unprecedented economic problems afflicted tenants throughout the country. Muffled but persistent retail complaints against brewers during hearings of the Royal Commission on Licensing (1929–31), far from being novel, had been recurring features of governmental commissions of the preceding sixty years. Four had threatened to reorder brewer/retailer relations: hiring of salaried managers as substitutes for profit-seeking publicans; brewers’ promotion of bogus clubs; brewers’ raising rents disproportionate to costs of alterations; and extension of brewers’ tied-house practices.
